Are you scouring the web for an in-depth, detail-oriented Luminati review to give you an unbiased scoop about their proxy service?
After hours of testing and research, you can find everything you need to know right here. I’ve dissected Luminati and compared it to other services I tried out.
If you’re ready to find out whether Luminati is safe, legit and the right choice for you, keep reading!
No time to read the full Luminati review? Below are the key takeaway points from my entire report for those in a hurry.
Luminati Review Summary:
| PROS | CONS |
|---|---|
| One of the big proxy service companies | Bad offers for individuals and medium-sized companies |
| They offer different kinds of proxy | Asks for a $500 minimum monthly commitment |
| Their focal point are big corporations and nothing else | |
| Heavily overpriced | |
| The service is of mixed quality | |
| Overpaying for limited bandwidth |
Top Luminati Alternatives
| Provider | Our Rating | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Proxyland | 4.7 | Check Price |
| Luminati | 4.0 | Check Price |
| Smartproxy | 3.7 | Check Price |
What is Luminati and How Does It Help You?
Luminati is one of the biggest proxy services that promise multiple IP types and a fast response time, with 100% uptime and no interruptions.
While available to regular consumers, Luminati is primarily targeted at businesses and large companies.
Luminati offers the following variety of proxies in over 200 countries of the world:
- Data-center proxies
- Static residential proxies
- Rotating residential proxies
- Mobile residential proxies
These different proxies can technically help you in many areas, such as market research, website testing, data scraping, and brand protection, to name a few.
Depending on your needs, you’ll lean towards proxies that better suit you.
So far, so good?
From my experience, this is the bottom line:
Luminati is one of the big players that sell their brand and image, with little consideration for individuals and small businesses.
Now that you are acquainted with the fundamentals of Luminati, let’s delve deeper into its performance.
How Luminati Works
Once you sign up and verify your Luminati account, you can opt to access their dashboard as a Chrome extension or through the manager.
In their control panel, you can access the “Zone,” where you set your parameters according to your needs and your chosen plan. For instance, they’ll ask you to create the title for your zone, select network type (residential/data-centered, etc.). Then you should change the proxy settings on your device.
You can also use it as a Chrome extension. In that case, you only need to select the country you wish and click the power button to turn it on in the extension bar.
Features of Luminati
Let’s go over the features Luminati offers.
Before I continue, though, I want to note that Luminati is priced 10 times as much as some other proxy services that offer similar features (for example, Proxyland). So, pay attention to these features to check whether they are unique and worth the price:
Residential Proxy
Residential proxies offer IPs of real people, which makes them less visible to spam filters. And Luminati boasts of having over 72 million IPs for their rotating residential proxies.
Quite astonishing, huh?
It offers three types of residential proxies – static, rotating, and mobile.
Static proxies are fast, but your data may become available to miners over time. You should choose this option if you need consistency (e.g., for your business).
Rotating residential proxies allow an additional layer of anonymity because they have a lot of residential proxy servers that don’t share a subnetwork, and your IP changes constantly. Think: You leave a website, and – boom – you are visiting from another IP.
Mobile residential proxies use over 7 million mobile IPs to mask your browsing requests on mobile phone devices over 3G and 4G networks.
Data-Center Proxy
These are non-physical IP addresses generated by data centers, independent of your ISP.
However, their similarity leads to clogging and banning, and you can get blacklisted from some websites because they aren’t legitimate IP addresses.
Automated Data Unblocker
The company boasts a 100% success rate when it comes to unblocking data and their usage of IP rotation, cookie, and header management.
Luminati Proxy Manager
Luminati’s Proxy Manager is an open-source tool. Routing is its best feature.
It basically reroutes requests through data center networks and then sends them off to residential or mobile networks if the first request fails.
Search Engine Crawler
This feature enables the user to accumulate the necessary data, and as with all of Luminati’s features, this one has been said to have a 100% success rate.
The crawler did deliver results, but I’ve previously utilized proxies with similar features, which were much more effective.
Luminati Costs and Pricing Plans
Luminati offers its customers three payment management options: pay as you go, monthly, or yearly subscription.
As you can see, Luminati services are offered at quite an expensive rate. In addition to their package prices, the residential network plan has a minimum monthly commitment of $500.
Some other services that I’ve tried, such as Proxyland, are 10 times cheaper while still offering pretty much the same services. For instance: Luminati charges $12.50 for 1 GB. In comparison, with Proxyland, you have the same proxies for $2.9 per 1 GB.
With all the advantages it has to offer, I believe you agree with me that Luminati isn’t the most cost-effective solution on the market.
Is Luminati Legit?
Based on Luminati’s features, it is a legit proxy company. But its previous reputation and attachment to Hola VPN some users mention don’t warrant much credibility.
While their services appear to be top-notch, the lack of genuine reviews in combination with them still being associated with some sketchy companies left me with some unanswered questions.
Still, they won’t steal your data or something like that.
Top Luminati Alternatives
When it all adds up, Luminati is just a regular proxy company priced as if it was the best one out there. They are selling you pretty much what’s already available elsewhere.
It seems that you are paying for their brand, too. And that isn’t likely to be included in your list of wanted features.
With some other services, such as Proxyland, you get what you are paying for without huge commitments that Luminati asks for:
- Residential proxies
- A large proxy pool (with over 10 million proxies)
- An easy and intuitive setup that offers you a personal dashboard to monitor your data consumption
- Reliable network uptime
- Sticky sessions
| Provider | Our Rating | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Proxyland | 4.7 | Check Price |
| Luminati | 4.0 | Check Price |
| Smartproxy | 3.7 | Check Price |
Luminati Pros and Cons
You can find my thoughts about Luminati summed up below:
| PROS | CONS |
|---|---|
| Globally-sourced proxy pool | A lot of sensitive information necessary for registration |
| A variety of proxies offered | Their services are aimed at big corporations |
| High prices for simple services | |
| Require big monthly commitments | |
| Slow customer support | |
| Unsuitable for individuals | |
| Doesn’t provide unlimited bandwidth | |
| Complex and counter-intuitive dashboard |
Luminati: Final Verdict
When you’re deciding where to invest in a proxy service, you want to be sure that you’ll get reliable proxies at an affordable price. In other words: a good money-to-value ratio.
Not with Luminati.
They are holding the monopoly over the market. Small and medium companies and individual entrepreneurs mean next to nothing to them.
If you want to steer towards an affordable and reliable service, check some that I’ve mentioned as my top alternatives, like Proxyland.
